GQ’s Favorite: Burberry Slim Fit Cotton Poplin Shirt in City Blue

Wearing a dress shirt telegraphs your grown man-ness to a room. It's a visual tell that you respect the occasion—wedding, interview, date, parole hearing—enough to put some effort into your outfit. For our money (and well, yours too), the dress shirt that presents best and looks great on every man alive is one in a color we very modestly call "GQ blue". It's a particular shade we take pains to find—lighter than French blue, more saturated than a basic light blue. It's a color that packs more punch than your average sky blue dress shirts out there and the brand that we always turn to to find the best one is Burberry.

4 Reasons We Love Burberry's Slim Fit Cotton Poplin Shirt

1. Have we mentioned its the right blue?:
Burberry calls their blue "City Blue" but we'll just call it perfect. That's because the color falls between washed out and overly-saturated (which, by the way, will just wash-out any white guy). It's enough color to pop against your go-to navy blazer and gray suit, but still stay office/wedding/night out appropriate.

2. The collar is all-purpose:
Right now, that means a hybrid between the semi-spread collar we've been hyping the last few years and a more fashion-forward point collar (the kind you're more likely to see on Parisian runways than J.Crew racks). It's the key to ensuring your dress shirt looks as good with your best tie as it does sans neckwear (long live the air tie). The Burberry's collar that pairs up, proportionally speaking, with just about any tie—be it boss-level 3-inches wide or a Saint Laurent-style skinny sliver.

3. This is how your dress shirt should fit right now:
The baggy, oversized dress shirts that defined the '90s gave way to the hyper-shrunken skinny cuts of the mid-Aughts, which brings us to today, a time where modern guys an understanding of how clothes should fit. And something like a dress shirt should be cut slim and fit close to the body, but not so tight that your buttons are working over time to stay fastened—which is just what this shirt does.

4. It's made from the right cotton
We're big fans of oxford cloth, but when it comes to dress shirts, poplin is your best bet. It's sleeker and softer than the sturdy cotton used in oxford button-downs, which is exactly what makes this shirt a dress shirt. Burberry's Italian poplin in particular can handle a machine wash and a proper ironing, something plenty of others—even in this price range—cannot.

A Closer Look

We don't have figures on just how many 1MX shirts Express sells in a year, but based on the number of men we see wearing them, we have to imagine a few barge loads worth. Not only are the shirts nicely priced, but their cut is spot-on, having more in common with shirts that cost five times as much (like the other two here) than the billowy basics you're used to seeing in this price range. This shirt shares shares the Burberry's everyman fit and modern-cut collar—though, sure, its stretch cotton isn't so soft on bare skin.

Anything that Gucci creative director and presiding fashion maximalist Alessandro Michele touches immediately becomes menswear gold. Even his take on a basic dress shirt has some left-of-center flourishes : The color is amped up just enough to stand out in a sea of MBAs, the collar is cut razor sharp (not quite full Dracula, but close), and the fit is no-carbs-for-me slim. Like the rest of Michele's white hot designs, this shirt requires a man's full commitment.

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